12th June 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear friends. How are you? Have you read any good books lately? Seen any good movies or series on the telly? Zoom meetings and Zoom grandchildren? It’s a funny old world we live in when people who have kept to the isolation/quarantine/lockdown religiously are so angry that they take…

5th June 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear friends   What a disturbing world we live in. Closure, lockdown, isolation, whatever one calls it, ultimately it has dire effects on one’s sanity. We were warned by many specialists that ultimately emotions would overflow into violence. The reason can be outrage at the cruelty of one human…

28th May 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear Friends, Shabbat Shalom, Happy Shevuot and Whitsun or for both of us, Pentecost   I woke today to a beautiful morning, the sun was just rising, a bright red ball behind wispy clouds and the air was still cool with a slight breeze. It is worth waking early…

22nd May 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear friends. How are you? Today I won’t talk of politics or trials, Iran, the PA or pandemics – today I will write about the city I love – Jerusalem   “Jerusalem is an epic. It is the well-spring of a civilization. Without Jerusalem’s civilization, the spiritual history of…

19th May 2020   Well here goes the Mid-week update!   Usually one says “Do you want the good news or the bad news”? Well, today I’m going to say “Do you want the ‘I have no idea what is going on’ news, or the incredible news!!   The I have no idea what is…

15th May, 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear friends. Shabbat Shalom and Ramadan Kareem   Obviously you know that yesterday was the 14th of May but I wonder if you know that two historic events occurred on that date? The first, which brought such enormous joy and pride to the Jewish people is the Declaration of…

  1st May, 2020 Good Shabbes, Shabbat Shalom, Happy May Day, just have a great day!   This week my missive really is about the View from our verandah since we haven’t been anywhere else!!   For a reason I have not yet worked out some of you didn’t get my missive for Remembrance Day,…

27th April 2020   Since we are all engulfed with the ramifications of this ghastly virus, I thought to begin with a quote from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who quoted Cicero’s De Legibus, he responded that since dodging death from the virus, he has doubled his efforts to care for the people of the…

  17th April, 2020   Shabbat Shalom!   Charles Dickens wrote a brilliant opening speech for his central character in the novel “A Tale of Two Cities”, a story of Paris and London. Sidney Carton (Dirk Bogarde), a young Barrister, stood on a bridge in Paris and said ““It was the best of times, it…

200408   8th April, 2020     In Hebrew this festival is called the Festival of Freedom, Chag ha Herut. Strange really that this year we spend the Freedom Festival in seclusion! On the other hand the seclusion, while imposed, doesn’t prevent us from celebrating as our ancestors did.   This week also leads up…